Space to Do Whatever, at Work • Hacker News Board

Re: Space to Do Whatever, at Work

#11

Post by pschuegr » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

Sirenos wrote: post #10

I'm glad to see this sentiment more vocally expressed lately. It's certainly nothing that hasn't been said before, but I think that reality hasn't caught up to the frustrations faced by knowledge workers. Imagine training as a musician, learning the fundamentals, and mastering your craft, only to be used as a glorified set of fingers for playing chords. This discussion tends to get muddled whenever I bring it up with…

I'm torn about this one. I personally (like most devs) am hyper-productive when I am focused on a problem that I'm interested in solving. But that often does not align with whatever is the most important for the company or the team or whatever is highest on the priority list. So yeah, I'd enjoy my job more if I could just work on fixing something that seems broken to me.

On the flip side, I've worked with a lot of folks who are way more interested in just... writing... more... code. And I would never give those people free reign, because in about two months you'd have doubled the size of your codebase, your complexity, and the amount of people you need to manage it.

Re: Space to Do Whatever, at Work

#12

Post by pschuegr » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

lazypenguin wrote: post #3

jrmiii wrote: post #2

I'm really interested in the community's perspective on this. It's a philosophy I really align with, but seems somewhat antithetical to big-A Agile Further, to me this sounds like the ideal work environment, but I've worked with folks who would consider this a frustrating experience with no clear direction.

I think the mistake I’ve seen made time and time again is not recognizing that the software engineers are just problem solvers. That means if you have a good team with a good structure, all you need to do is bring the problem to the team with clear requirements and context. From there the team should be free to solve the problem however they see fit within the constraints of the requirements. You then need to keep th…

+1 to this, but I feel like "if you have a good team with good structure" is hand-waving away some pretty heavy stuff ;) It's the "#1 be good looking #2 don't be ugly" of the software world - if you have great people, you can literally just point them at a problem and let them go. You just have to stay out of their way.

In reality, most teams are working with some people who are still learning, some people who don't really want to be there, some people who are interested in writing promotion-ware, etc.

Re: Space to Do Whatever, at Work

#13

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:18 PM UTC

pschuegr wrote: post #11

Sirenos wrote: post #10

I'm glad to see this sentiment more vocally expressed lately. It's certainly nothing that hasn't been said before, but I think that reality hasn't caught up to the frustrations faced by knowledge workers. Imagine training as a musician, learning the fundamentals, and mastering your craft, only to be used as a glorified set of fingers for playing chords. This discussion tends to get muddled whenever I bring it up with…

I'm torn about this one. I personally (like most devs) am hyper-productive when I am focused on a problem that I'm interested in solving. But that often does not align with whatever is the most important for the company or the team or whatever is highest on the priority list. So yeah, I'd enjoy my job more if I could just work on fixing something that seems broken to me. On the flip side, I've worked with a lot of fo…

Yeah and then you end up with a manager who hacks out a complicated solution to problems we don't have and ships it to prod.

And obviously you can't tell them it's a terrible idea because they're your manager.